Diane Ravitch: A Life in Education

The historian Diane Ravitch is a proud graduate of the public
schools she so often takes to task in her books, including Left
Back: A Century of Failed School Reforms, published last month by
Simon and Schuster.

A 62-year-old native of Texas, she attended the Houston public
schools from 1943 to 1956, along with her seven brothers and sisters.
"I treasure the memory of wonderful teachers," she writes, "though I
also recall the large number of classmates who were guided into
nonacademic programs, as well as the policy of de jure racial
segregation that prevented me from meeting children of other racial
backgrounds."

She received a bachelor's degree from Wellesley College in 1960 and
a Ph.D. in history from Columbia University's graduate school of arts
and sciences in 1975. Her mentor at Columbia was the late Lawrence A.
Cremin, who wrote a seminal history of progressivism in American
education. Ms. Ravitch served as an adjunct professor of history and
education at Teachers College, Columbia University, from 1975 to
1991.

From 1991 to 1993, she served as the U.S. Department of Education's
assistant secretary for educational research and improvement in the
Bush administration. While at the agency, she helped launch a national
push for academic standards that she saw as a means of giving all
students access to a rigorous curriculum. In 1995, she wrote a defense
of the effort, National Standards in American Education: A Citizen's
Guide.

Several of her historical works on public education, including
The Troubled Crusade: American Education, 1945-1980 (1983), and
The Great School Wars: New York City, 1805-1973 (1974),
chronicle her view of the extent to which schools have been used, often
unsuccessfully, to achieve social rather than academic ends.

She is currently a research professor of education at New York
University and holds the Brown chair in education policy at the
Washington-based Brookings Institution, where she is a senior fellow
and edits the Brookings Papers on Education Policy.

While Ms. Ravitch often skewers progressives in her writing, she
calls herself an independent, in politics and in education. Her own
children attended a private progressive school in New York City she
describes as "academically rigorous and pedagogically venturesome."

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